The new issue of Damn the Caesars, Richard Owens’ magazine out of Buffalo, technically vol. III, is worth reading, even if it also is troubling in some old familiar ways. Owens knows that the editorial positioning of content in a journal is, in and of itself, a syntax, an exposition, an argument. He is masterful at this, indeed one of very best since, say, Clayton Eshleman in knowing what to put where.

DtheC starts off with a longish poem – a single 327-line stanza, the lines themselves stretching most of the way across the page – by Thomas Meyer. “The Magician’s Assistant” is so atypical of Meyer’s mature work that it is by definition a major publication. I can report also that it’s a terrific poem, dense, fresh, surprising, full of wit, a great read. It more than justifies the $10 price of the magazine.

The Meyer piece starts off the opening section of the journal, containing also work by Steve McCaffery, Karen Mac Cormack & Dale Smith. All are given a substantial space to work with – excluding one Korean feature, the journal gives each contributor an average of 8.5 pages, and everyone seems to have taken advantage of this by sending in their very best work.

The Korean feature is the volume’s second section, a selection of five major contemporary poets – Ko Un, Kim Seung-Hui, Ynhui Park, Lee Si-Young & Chonggi Mah – between the ages of 55 & 77. Ko Un is of course world famous & two of the others have significant U.S. connections (Chonggi Mah, having been an M.D. in Toledo, lives part of the year in Florida). The English versions, by Brother Anthony of Taizé with the help of three native speakers, are first rate. Everything here reads like poetry & can be judged on its own merits, rather than taken as an approximation.

The third section again contains the poetry of four English-speaking poets – the late Bill Griffiths (who must have died while this was in press), Stan Mir, Peter Finch & Thom Donovan. The selection by Griffiths, a long untitled poem in 22 parts and a short essay on David Jones’ inscriptions, are quite wonderful. We’ve never had anyone quite like Griffiths in the US, a one-time Hells Angel with a Ph.D., a terrific ear & great love for detail.

The fourth section consists of a 20-page selection of poetry by Andrzej Bursa, a brilliant Polish poet who died of congenital heart failure at the of 25 in 1957 (that is him on the left in the image above, the cover of the issue). In a five-page introductory essay, Kevin Christianson, one of the two translators, compares Bursa variously to Dorothy Parker, Phillip Larkin, ee cummings & the Beats, which mostly tells you that Christianson doesn’t read contemporary poetry. The poems here, however, sound like they were written just yesterday, maybe by a sharp young poet taking workshops at St. Marks. You’re more aware here of the scrim of translation between reader & “original” than with the earlier Korean materials, but on the whole these are very good.

The last general section contains the work of six poets – Sotère Torregian, Michael Kelleher, Richard Deming, Rachel Levitsky, Jonathan Greene & Billy Childish. Only Childish, one of the key figures of anti-conceptual British Stuckism, is new to me here. Since Childish appears to have published some 30 books, made many records & painted over 1,000 paintings, my lack of familiarity suggests either (a) I need to get out more or (b) British work still has a terrible time with U.S. distribution. The Torregian is especially interesting, given this latter-day surrealist’s & one-time NY School poet (he’s lived in Northern California for decades) apparent reticence toward publishing. The piece is a photocopy of a “petite” essay on Mahmoud Darwish, “The Poet as Outlaw.” As essay, the piece looks closer to notes for an otherwise impromptu talk, but it’s fascinating to watch the poet thinking, which is what this deeply annotated piece really is.

But what really struck most in this issue is a tone that shows up almost satirically in Childish’s “I Come With Shin Bones Like Knives.” Here is its first stanza, the extra spacing part of the original:

it is wonderfull being a man
and
washing your body down at the sink
in the early morning
with a flannel rough as a badgers arse

And here, a page later, is the final stanza:

this
is my shit
and it smells good to me

This is almost Archie Bunkerville in its masculinist take on the world. It does, however, serve to call attention to the rest of Damn the Caesars as a whole. And here I note that I misspoke above when I suggested that the issue led off with work by Thomas Meyer. There is, in fact, a short epigraph facing Meyer’s first page with a quote from Michael Palmer’s “The Flower of Capital”:

Politics seems a realm of power and persuasion that would like to subsume poetry (and science, and fashion, and …)under its mantle, for whatever noble or base motives. Yet if poetry is to function – politically – with integrity, it must resist such appeals as certainly as it resists others.

Editor Owens makes something of the same point in a final essay that looks at the editing process under the belligerent heading of “Take It or Leave It.” Pointedly, Owens writes:

This journal is no different. It is implicated in precisely the thing it aims to critique – exclusion and the willful production of scarcity. This is, after all, a print journal, and, as a print journal, limits are immediately imposed upon the range of things it can do.

So let’s take a quick peek at who is being limited through exclusion. Mostly it’s women. The current issue has 15 contributors outside of the Korean selection, of whom just two are female, 13 percent. One of the five Koreans is female. By page count, it’s even worse – Karen Mac Cormack, Kim Seung-Hui and Rachel Levitsky have just 13 pages or eight percent of the 162 pages given to content. Let me put this another way: 92 percent of the content is by men.

Nor is volume III exceptional in this regard, going back through the archives, one quickly realizes that of the 101 contributors to the journal’s history (a big second volume, plus all four issues of the first) whose gender can be identified (I failed in the case of Jan Bender), only 18 have been women. Volume II, with 24 percent of its contributors being women, is the best Damn the Caesars has ever done.

I know that this plays into Stephanie Young & Juliana Spahr’s critique of a gendered poetry world (PDF) in the new Chicago Review as well as the statistical analysis (PDF) done there by ChiRev editors Joshua Kotin & Robert P. Baird. In general, Kotin & Baird focus on more institutional publications, The Nation, New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, Southern Review, TriQuarterly, than they do the likes of Damn the Caesars, tho Spahr & Young are kind enough to include Silliman’s Blog where they’ve done some impressive work counting noses & calculating percentages.

It’s one thing to suggest, as I have at times, that we are in the midst of a long historic transformation between the roles played by various genders and that different moments and/or stages are discernible along the way, and a journal like DtheC that behaves as if the 1950s were still the present. Eight percent? At least the Allen anthology 43 years ago got to nine with its four contributors out of 44.

All of which leaves me with this very uneasy feeling – a sense that Owens’ afterward may in fact be as much a prophylactic against such criticism than a statement in & for itself. On the one hand, this is a wonderful issue with much great stuff worth reading. On the other, I have a hard – impossible – time imagining any woman ever wanting to buy this issue & I have to confess that I myself come away from it feeling very sad indeed. And I don’t think that was the editor’s intent.

Jordan Davis and Chris Edgar know the secret of editing a magazine that is ordered alphabetically. It helps to get work either from a Rae Armantrout – as they have done with the seventh issue of The Hat – a John Ashbery (who led off its fourth number), an Anselm Berrigan (issue number two). It’s those little touches – like knowing how best to title an untitled poem on the page – that shows their experience & intelligence. The result is a journal that is always worth reading. Still, I came away with questions after reading the current issue that made me wonder just where both poetry and the institution of the magazine might be headed.

I don’t think there is any publication more dedicated to the work it presents than The Hat. Like most if not all strengths in life, this is also its weakness. It’s not simply that there is no embellishment, no art work, no commentary, no contributors’ notes, a minimalist design that stretches from the cover to the idea of having only author’s names in a san seraph that contrasts with the roman type of these texts on the white, white page. Even to the alphabetical ordering, The Hat lets you know in every way possible that it is precisely – and only – a repository for texts. Each issue is a small archive. Tho, oddly perhaps, the journal’s website fails to pick up on this, simply replicating the minimalism of the print edition, listing names without actually posting work. This raises the question: would this work better online? Wouldn’t these poets even ultimately become more accessible if this were online? The first five issues would appear to be out of print & hence out of sight. Is this a way of distributing the work, or of limiting distribution? I think you can make a good argument in either direction.

Because of its deliberate plainness, the almost Mennonite severity of its approach, it can be hard to discern the very active editorial intelligence that is at play here. When you have 64 contributors with 99 poems and one story (or is it 98 and two if we place Anne Boyer’s prose suite on the side of narrativity, if not fiction as such?) dividing 152 pages, point of view can difficult to convey – that’s partly what is wrong with most campus literary magazines. Here The Hat excels – it offers work that mostly falls in such a distinct range that its personality as a publication is almost instantly apparent. If you like the writing of the folks whose poetry you already know – Armantrout, Jim Behrle, Aaron Belz, Anne Boyer, Jesse Crockett, Vincent Katz, Wayne Koestenbaum, Reb Livingston, Rachel Loden, Catherine Meng, Andrew Mister, Charles North, Ken Rumble, Gary Sullivan, Chris Vitiello – you are very apt to like the writing of the people who are completely new to you. Thus Jason Koo turns out to have one of the most exciting pieces in the entire issue, tho it’s remarkable just how close Koo’s recounting of lost loves feels, in practice, to Gary Sullivan’s broad satire of a help desk call center for poets or to Rev Livingston's more collage like list of “What There Wasn’t Time to Mention.” Since there is no contributor’s note, I can’t tell you anything about Koo that you can’t find out by googling.

Editorially, a project like this turns on three or four decisions: who goes first? is there to be a consistent tone, and if so, what? which contributors get the most space? In general, you might characterize this tone as post-NY school, although there are exceptions like an Armantrout or a Koestenbaum, Rumble or Vitiello who don’t quite fit that picture. Still, the poet who has the most work here is Gary Lenhart so that it is his work, and the long story by Dale Herd, that ultimately define the issue.

Herd is a prose writer who, some 35 years ago, was loosely associated with the poetics of the Bolinas mesa, which brought together Creeley and Bobbie Louise Hawkins with Joanne Kyger, Richard Brautigan, and such NY School exiles as Lewis Mac Adams, Bill Berkson & Tom Clark. Herd’s prose in those days was part of the broader tradition of fiction for poets that Creeley, Hawkins & Brautigan all practiced, along with the likes of Douglas Woolf, Fielding Dawson, Michael Rumaker & Jim Dodge. Herd had three books (Early Morning Wind, Diamonds and Wild Cherries) in eight years, two of them published in Bolinas, the third in Berkeley, and then nothing for over a quarter century. So “The Dream” published here is a real coup – the sort of piece another journal would have put up front, rather than burying between Anne Heide and Claire Hero. It appears to have been written if not very recently, at least well after his early books, and its tone is more straight forward & less stylized than his earlier writing. As narrative, it’s masterfully simple, with not a single wasted move or extra word that I could see.

Lenhart has always been one of the more affable members of the New York School’s third generation and the poems here all fit comfortably into that mode. They are well written, personal and contained. Which may be why they set the tone for so much else in this issue. Imagine, if you will, walking into an art gallery and seeing a show by five dozen or so painters all doing smallish still lifes in the style of Wayne Thiebaud. Thiebaud himself is a wonderful painter, but dozens and dozens of such works with dozens of names attached to them would frankly be exhausting. That’s a little how I felt reading The Hat – poem after poem that I liked but very few that I actually could say I loved. Perhaps just Armantrout’s, Koo’s and a piece by Wayne Koestenbaum. Koestenbaum, the archivist of beatitudes and the Bettie Page of situationism, the Cal Arts of maple syrup & the Beresford of bilge, is somebody whom I’ve been reading for years without getting particularly excited. But “Possessiveness,” his piece here, which lists 29 “X of Y” constructions such as the four I’ve just deployed, strips the poem of everything but figurativity and feels like a bucket of Gatorade in ice dumped over your head after some 80 pages of warm, cozy Other. His two other pieces here are superb as well.

It’s the contrast that Koestenbaum creates, coming as he does deep in the issue, makes me worry about the future of what I think of as post-NY School writing. It very much feels here as tho the tradition, to call it that, is at risk of being conquered by its own domesticity. It reminds me that Davis himself has (or has had) a project called a Million Poems, an idea that has always made me wonder. His own poems are always well-made, but the premise suggests its own problematic – who needs a million well-made poems, regardless of how friendly and bright they might be? It is of course just another way of slicing the Whitman-Zukofsky “the words are my life” longpoem approach to one’s work, but it’s a strategy that privileges containment, discreteness, segmentation. The world wrought small. It seems to me that The Hat comes very close to being an argument for such a poetics, while at the same time revealing precisely what the risks must be.

This is where the personality of the journal, one of its best features, is a weakness – there is no visual poetry here, and no poetry that would suggest anything on the order of a broader aesthetic perspective. You can’t imagine Lyn Hejinian here, nor Barrett Watten, nor Nate Mackey, nor Will Alexander. David Antin would be as much of a shock as Richard Wilbur, Kenny Goldsmith as much as C.D. Wright. In reaching out to other aesthetics that don’t disrupt its tight frame – Armantrout, Herd, Koestenbaum, Rumble, etc. – The Hat ultimately feels timid. Disruption is precisely what it needs.

That average tenure of a web page being between 44 and 75 days is carried upwards some by the presence of Ygdrasil, which makes a good case for having been the first literary journal on the net, or at the very least the oldest continuous such publication. In the words of editor Klaus Gerken, Ygdrasil – the name refers to the tree in Norse mythology that holds heaven, earth & hell together – the journal actually predates the origin of the World Wide Web as we know it in June 1993, having functioned from

May 1993 to Oct 1994 on the BBS circuit (24 countries phoning in to get the magazine on a monthly basis), then Igal Koshevoy created the first Ygdrasil Internet pages in Nov 1994….

Koshevoy gave up poetry a year later & basically walked away from the project, with Gerken & Pedro Sena taking over in December 1995, revising Ygdrasil into its current form. Since August of 2000, the Literary Archives of Canada have archived the Ygdrasil site.

As an early adopter, Ygdrasil shows the features (and limits) of its origin – it made design decisions early on when the options were fewest & not well understood. The text of each issues is on a single, rather endless HTML page, with pages that might as well be still in ascii. No flash graphics here. The logo reminds me, actually, of the magazine graphics Andy Warhol did before he became famous as an artist, as such. But those were in the early 1950s. Still, the journal’s interest in works in Spanish (there have been several special issues) as well as translated from the Spanish – and in the work of Clayton Eshleman – ensures its legacy. And it has received over 750,000 hits since a counter was installed back in 2001, making it one of the most widely perused journals online. Yet at some level, Ygdrasil has the dubious distinction of being, almost by definition, the online journal that has needed a design update the longest as well.

If Sylvester Pollet’s Backwoods Broadsides chaplet series represents the epitome of pristine design and text presentation in micropublishing, Kenneth Warren’s House Organ is its polar opposite. Even though the two publications have occasionally printed the same people, they’re as far apart in some ways as two magazines could get. Typeset in a san-serif font that is hard-going on the page – it works far better on a PC screen – House Organ is copied onto 8.5- by 11-inch sheets of white paper and then stapled in a saddle-stitch format down the center longwise to create a journal in which the pages are 11 inches tall but only 4.25 inches wide. Sent through the mail sans envelope, my copies arrive bent, nicked, torn. Inside, Warren appears to have a horror of white space – each page is as crowded with text as is humanly possible. In the summer 2002 issue, the last inch & one-half of the very last page is given to Cid Corman’s contribution, wedged in as though an afterthought. House Organ is so ugly that it can’t possibly be an accident – Warren is insisting that these works have to be taken on their merits alone.

Yet in spite of all this, House Organ always has something of interest & is often a very lively publication. It is literally the only Projectivist publication extant in the United States. In addition to Corman, the summer issue, number 39, includes work by Tom Meyer, Albert Glover, Vincent Ferrini, Olson biographer Tom Clark, and the fourth installment of Warren’s own tour through Charles Olson’s Selected Letters, plus another ten contributors that include Paul Pines & Joseph Massey, whose first book, Minima St. I reviewed on the blog, September 19.* In fact, short works, such as those favored by Corman & Massey, work best in this format. Here is Corman’s, entitled “1/”:

This is getting you

nowhere – exactly

where you were heading

once your mother fed you.

And this is Massey’s untitled poem:

            Forefinger

stuck in peripheral

make

a moon

There is a way in which a short work creates its own white space, cognitively if not physically. The self containment that is possible in a work of this scale serves these pieces, which stand out in the context of House Organ more clearly than do longer pieces, even when those works are as thoroughly composed & finished as these, as in Tom Meyer’s excerpts from “Book Two”** or Tom Clark’s poems on the September 11 attacks.

Projectivism of course was always more interested in the poem as document of thinking more than of the finished text & House Organ’s summer issue shows just how far such work might go. Gloucester poet Vincent Ferrini provides an annotated list of the “Authors in My Life,” interesting mostly because they aren’t who you might think. Albert Glover’s “Sketching Greg” comes straight out of a creative writing class project, literally, of having students write in the presence of a “life model” – the nude male of the title – while listening to the music of John Coltrane.*** To call Glover’s poetry slack misses the point completely. There is simply no attempt to work toward a polished surface, it is literature as pure process:

so let us occupy a safe space

   made by some invisible wall

          arms like little legs

winged up behind Greg’s back

            (Michele must be looking

right up his butt)

That Glover organizes the “g”s and the terminal “k” in that first stanza is fortuitous, perhaps the one singular moment in the three pages of the piece. But, as Michele can see, it’s not necessarily the point of this project. What makes this kind of poetry “difficult” or off-putting to non-fans of Projectivism is how much it depends on the inherent value of traced thought regardless of the quality of thinking. It’s one thing when one is reading a brilliant if undisciplined polymath like Charles Olson. As Paul Blackburn’s Journals show, even a fine poet does not necessarily make for great reading when writing becomes all but dissociated from intention.

Invariably, one comes across work in a publication like House Organ by people whose names are unfamiliar. Robert Podgurski in the summer issue has a poem, “Insistence,” that feels quite uneven. Its third stanza shines and the final one is technically competent, but I don’t get anything from the first two beyond a couple of unusual adjectives – anguine, batrachian – that would compel me to reread them enough times to really get what he’s trying to say. I wish there were some contributors’ notes that would direct me me to other publications. I’m curious, but there’s no guarantee I’ll remember the name the next time I happen across it in print.

So I get House Organ & am always interested, but I seem to fight with a lot of what is going on – not, I suppose, too unlike my relationship to certain aspects of Projectivism. House Organ is available from Kenneth Warren at 1250 Belle Avenue, Lakewood, Ohio 44107.

*Which just happened to be his 24^th birthday.

** Suggesting of course the presence of “Book One” & the possibility of others. Is there a new Tom Meyer long poem in the works?

*** I didn’t know that there were creative writing classes that still did this. This wasn’t so uncommon in the 1960s.